In democratic move, Facebook seeks user input on policies
— -- Facebook is giving its 175 million-plus members an unprecedented voice in helping dictate the social networking giant's future governing direction.
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement Thursday in the aftermath of last week's firestorm over controversial changes to Facebook's terms of use agreement.
"The purpose of Facebook is to make the world more open and transparent by giving people the power to share information," he said on a conference call. "We really took last week as a strong signal about how people cared about Facebook and wanted to be involved in helping to govern it."
Members will get to comment on any proposed changes to a set of "Facebook Principles" and a separate "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities," both issued Thursday. They'll have until March 29. If need be, Facebook will put any subsequent changes up to a vote that will be binding if more than 30% of active registered members cast a ballot.
Facebook also said it would establish a "user council" to help draft documents.
Among tenets unveiled Thursday, Facebook says, "People should own their information" and "have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere." Concern about who owned information and what could be done with it was at the core of the heat Facebook took last week.
"We do not own user data … we never really intended to give that impression and feel very bad that we did," Zuckerberg said.
"It is a milestone in the development of Internet governance," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Part of what Facebook has realized is this is the largest online community in the world, and it can't simply be a relationship between a business and its customers."
Ray Valdes at researcher Gartner thinks the changes could provide Facebook a competitive advantage. But distilling it all into understandable language isn't easy. "They have 44 pages of legalese contracts — terms of service for users, developers and advertisers. That's a lot of fairly precise wording that they boil down to 51/2 pages. My question is what got left out?"
